Either you grow teeth, or you end up fed to the fishes.
“I’m too pissed to hate you,” he said. “Maybe I even owe Bennie a favor for growing you up, way I never could. Maybe you won’t yell cop-out so loud now, ’cause Bennie’s right, we all got a price. Cat thinks he don’t, just hasn’t been offered his price yet. Hate you, I gotta hate myself, and you came back to me, did it to have a chance to live forever, play Baby Bolshevik games with my head on the side. In a funny way, I respect that—what I would’ve done in your place, after all. Question is, do you really love me now?”
“I’ve never loved you more in my whole life,” she said, and he saw the funky worship-look in her eyes, and warmth went through him from the tip of his toes, curled around his ears as he clocked the hot hungry love for him, not for living-color image-Jack-Barron, not Baby Bolshevik Galahad cheap-talk bullshit hero… Me, he thought. Maybe she finally digs me, where I’m really at—wherever the fuck that is!
“Likewise,” he said, and he kissed her soft and tender first-kiss type kiss, mouths open tasting each other like for the first time, but tongues apart, love-kiss without passion, and he never remembered kissing her quite like this before.
“You’ll do it?” she asked, arms around his waist, face inches from his, earnest little-girl conspiracy face, playing games even now, and how can I put it down when it’s so like me?
“Do what?” he said, smiling a vidphone gambit put-on smile.
“Sign the contracts.”
“I’d be a schmuck not to, wouldn’t I?” Jack Barron said. And that’s where it is at, isn’t it? he thought. Who’s a big enough schmuck to choose death? You know that real good, don’t you Bennie?
“But you won’t… you won’t play that horrible reptile’s game…?” she said (and he saw that damned old Berkeley look creep back into her eyes, Jack and Sara versus the Forces of Evil, won’t she ever grow up all the way? Do you really want her to?). “All those people out there who trust you, whether you like it or not.… You can’t sell out all those people who believe in you, let them die just because we’ve got ours. I mean, once we’ve got immortality for ourselves you’ve gotta fight Howards. You’re the only man can stop him, the man a hundred million people believe in, the only man Howards is afraid of, you’re… you’re Jack Barron, and sometimes I think you’re the only one doesn’t know what Jack Barron is. You can’t be Howards’ flunky, a stooge, a… You’re Jack Barron.”
Barron hugged her to him, looked out over the teeming streets, the lights of Brooklyn stretching from coast to coast, as she buried her face in his neck, a hundred million TV-antenna Wednesday-night-eyes all on him and what would they say, those image-vampires, if they knew it all?
Play our game, is what they’d say, he knew. Lay your ass on the line for us, boy, you owe it to us. No different from Luke or Morris or Bennie, all thinking they own my bod—except they don’t have the stake to play the game.
Yeah, just like Bennie. Everybody wants to own poor old Jack Barron, and nobody’s got the word that Jack Barron owns himself, is all.
Jack Barron pulled the warmth of his woman to him. “Don’t worry Sara,” he said, “I don’t play Howards’ game.” (Or anyone else’s.)
Fuck you, Bennie, he thought. Fuck you all! None of you, not Bennie, not Luke, not the Great Unwashed losers down there, not even you, Sara—is gonna own Jack Barron!
11
Better be it, or I feed you right to the fishes, enough crapping around Barron, and I gotta come to this crazy joint too? Benedict Howards thought as he sat down on some screwy iron-and-leather kite of a chair, stared across at Jack Barron perched like some oily Arab trader on a silly-ass camel saddle, framed by the open terrace behind him palm trees or whatever you call the dumb things look like cheaphotel phony rubberplants hot and cold running whores in Tulsa or San Jose or some other nowhere boom town with plenty of money and no class—yeah, it figures Jack Barron would go for that kind of California horseshit.
Howards opened his attaché case, took out two contracts in triplicate, handed them across to Barron along with his old-fashioned 14-carat-gold felt-tip pen. “There they are, Barron,” he said. “Contract for you, contract for Sara Westerfeld or Barron or whatever her last name is—made out to Sara Westerfeld, since that’s her legal name at the moment. All signed by me, paid up by ‘anonymous donor,’ and standard Freeze Contracts except for the immortality option clause. Just sign all the copies, and we can get down to your end of the bargain.”
Barron leafed through one of the copies, looked up, measured Howards with those goddamned smirking eyes of his, said: “Let’s get this straight, Bennie, once I sign these contracts, you can’t welch, I send one of my copies to a very safe place, with instructions to release it to the press with the whole scam on your having an immortality treatment, in case anything should happen to me, dig?”
Howards smiled. You’re so smart, Barron, think you’re two steps ahead of Benedict Howards, think I don’t know what you’re thinking—Jack Barren’s got his insurance, where’s yours, Howards, smells too easy? Chase your own tail, Barron, never figure out your insurance is really my insurance till it’s way too late and I own you down to the soles of your feet, and you’re too far in to ever back out till it’s your immortal life million years strong young cool-skinned women, air-conditioned arenas of power forever to lose same as mine, and then you’re my man all the way, like Senators, Governors, and goddamn it, President too, Mr Howards, despite goddamn idiot Hennering.
“You don’t even have to trust me that far,” Howards said with carefully-guarded casualness. “You and your wife can exercise the immortality option the moment you sign, if you want to. In fact you can fly back to Colorado with me tonight, have the treatment, and be back better than new in time for your next show. With Deep Sleep recovery, it’s all over in two days. You don’t have to trust me at all; you can collect your payoff before you have to deliver anything.”
Barron’s eyes narrowed even as Howards anticipated his suspicion. “That smells like a dead flounder to me. I don’t figure you for the trusting type, Bennie, and it looks like you’re trusting me, and that, baby, I don’t trust at all.”
Keep on thinking that way sucker, Howards thought. Go home in a barrel thinking you can out-con Benedict Howards.
“Who trusts you?” Howards replied smoothly. “I got it set up so neither of us has to trust the other, and you better believe it. I can play the press-release game too, and where would that leave you, Mr Champion of the Underdog? On public record, selling out to the Foundation. How long you think you keep your show then? You may be a lot of things, but I don’t think you’re stupid enough to blow everything just to double-cross me. We both got our names on dangerous paper, and neither of us can afford to make it public. It’s a double insurance policy, Barron.” And once you have the treatment, it’ll be more than your silly career, it’ll be your life, your million-year-life in my hands, if you think about pulling a fast one.
Howards felt Barron measuring him, trying to think holes in his position, knew that he wouldn’t find any because there’s only one hole, and it gives me the big edge, Barron, and you’ll never find that one till you’re in way over your head. Go ahead, smart-ass, try and out-think Benedict Howards won’t be the first man’s tried, won’t be the last to go home in a barrel oil leases Lyndon, Senators Governors doctors nurses tube up nose down throat fading black circle all thought they could get Benedict Howards, and I beat ’em all, conned ’em, bought ’em, destroyed ’em, owned ’em, really think you can get the best of the only man bigger than death, winner over all forces of the fading black circle?